From infosthetics.com

“Lost in the rush towards technical innovation are the human dimensions of the relationship between people.”

On Being a therapist, Kottler J A, 1993

I saw a TV piece on the pet food contamination scandal in the US recently which affected many dogs and cats. It was interesting to note the initial confusion amongst consumers as the contamination affect many different brands across different price points and market positions. This is because like many other mass manufacture-based industries, the pet food sector sources its base products from relatively few manufacturers …

“When play comes first, learning comes naturally.” Playskool TV commercial.

Businesses cannot hope to begin to leverage the innate creativity and learning ability of their people if they continue to rigidly define work, training and R&D as separate, isolated silos.

If work feels like work most of the time, there is not enough play!

Company structures may well still be based on the factory model. But the cogs of the machine, the workers, are no longer the illiterate and externally-motivated unwashed. In fact, most knowledge workers these days do wash!

It is no longer sufficient to blindly follow last century’s “best-practices” when it comes to “managing” knowledge workers. New processes, tools and strategies founded on the basis of respect and collaboration are the …

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
ISBN-10: 0439813786
ISBN-13: 978-0439813785

A beautiful combination of novel, graphic novel, and movie. Selznick has really created a new approach here to the idea of a book. And it is a great story to boot.

Here’s a “deleted scene” from the book on Amazon, typical of the beautiful drawings therein.

The author’s passion and dedication really showed through. I …

An entertaining and profound talk by Sir Ken Robinson on education, creativity, talent, and the future. Everyone should indeed watch this.

GK Chesterton in What’s Wrong with the World:
“There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: The fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. A practical man means a man accustomed o merely daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will …

So you can’t decide whether to be a millionaire or an artist?
Hot, unmissable tips on GapingVoid.
Thanks be to Stilgherrian for the heads up.

Global easy access to components (from low to high-tech) + global easy access to distributed intelligence and knowledge = build amazing stuff that would not have been as easily possible otherwise.

Example here.

What is the impact of this on our individual ability to change our world?
What happens when you no longer need the infrastructure and R&D of a large corporation to build stuff like this?